← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Domestic Strife
00:27:46
Kate Adie introduces Correspondents' stories. This week Paul Wood hears warnings of to...
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Hello from the.
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From our own correspondence studios at Broadcasting
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House in London, you've downloaded the latest edition of the programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today we hear from Ukraine how our correspondent now thinks of time as before MH17 and after MH17. South Africa's trial of the century has ended with some wondering, was it ever anything more than a celebrity court case in Barcelona? We're urged to make love, but certainly not in Spanish. And why focusing on men's infidelities in Ivory coast isn't just a bit of fun. President Obama has said that the fight against IS militants will go on for years. He's called for a campaign to degrade and ultimately destroy, as he put it, the so called Islamic State, including airstrikes in Syria. The rapid advance of the Islamic State, or isis, has created hundreds of thousands of refugees and crises across the region. Paul Wood, who's been travelling in Syria and Iraq, is now back on base in Beirut. But he warns of serious consequences for Lebanon.
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Here are two stories from a summer reporting on the Islamic State. The first is about a little Yazidi boy. It is one of the bleakest I have covered. We saw him in hospital, half paralyzed and impassive, as the nurses changed his clothes or tried to drip water into his mouth. He was around four years old and had been discovered in the desert close to death. He'd been left behind in the desperate flight from the Islamic State. His eyes had dried out so much he couldn't blink and now could barely see. No one knew his name or exactly how long he'd been left on his own. But two weeks later, his parents were found in a refugee camp. They said they'd been trying to carry other young children for miles through the brutal 50 degree heat. Finally, they'd been forced to abandon their disabled son. It was a choice most parents face only in nightmares which child to save. There was to be no joyous reunion. The little boy died before his mother and father could reach the hospital. The second story is about Sergeant Ali Said of the Lebanese army. He was captured by jihadis along with some 30 other soldiers. The Islamic State beheaded him and another soldier and is threatening to kill more. Every night, anguished families appear on Lebanese television demanding action from the government. Some promise revenge attacks. This has raised fears of a return to the country's civil war. The Islamic State has awakened the monster within us, announced the Ankha on Lebanese TV news. There is no appetite for another war here. Lebanese remember the last time only too well. In A morning tent filled with local dignitaries. Sergeant Said's father caught the national mood when he said he hoped the government would solve the problem, not militias and gunmen. I ask people to protect the country, not to ruin it, he said. Both stories, the deaths of Sergeant Said and of the little Yazidi boy are connected by the Islamic State's grab for territory to make their new caliphate, erasing the old and to their mind, colonial borders of the Middle East. The land grab wasn't very successful in Lebanon. The jihadis briefly came over the border from Syria to take the rough smugglers town of Arsal. They were pushed back by the Lebanese army, but not before taking their hostages much further east. In Iraq, the territorial expansion seems more durable. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled, some of them reaching Lebanon. They join a million and a half Syrian refugees already here. That's now one in three of the Lebanese population. Most of those refugees are Sunni Muslim, altering Lebanon's delicate religious and sectarian balance. The Islamic State are Sunni too. And in response to the hostage crisis, notices have sprung up in parts of Beirut telling Syrians they have 48 hours to leave or face the consequences. The second Lebanese soldier beheaded was a Shiite, as are most of the soldiers. In some Shia areas, masked gunmen have stopped buses, removing Syrian men, beating them and slashing them with knives. They can't expect to slit the throat of one of our people and get away with it, declared a Shia man in southern Beirut. He added, the sectarian war has started. Faced with that dreadful prospect, Lebanon's political leaders are so far united. Sunnis in the government are the public face of the response to the Islamic State threat. This is partly a civil war within the Sunni community. Moderates against extremists. Sergeant Said the first soldier beheaded was himself a Sunni. If the moderates lose, then the conflict will become more simply sectarian. This is the potential catastrophe facing the whole region, not just Lebanon. In Iraq, the Yazidis I spoke to said they didn't hope or even wish to remain in the Middle East. The reason was that the people who chased them from their homes were their Sunni Arab neighbours who'd sworn loyalty to the Islamic State. The Islamic State is not merely some foreign blight, but has grown out of the soil of Iraq and Syria. That's why President Obama spoke of politics as well as bombing, of enlisting Sunnis in the fight against isis. Millions of Sunnis and Shias still live as neighbors from Baghdad to Beirut. But once sectarian killing begins, it's hard to stop it escalating. If the Islamic State turns neighbours against each other across the region. The monster will truly have escaped.
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Paul Wood in Beirut so the Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide or manslaughter. He'll be sentenced in October. The televised trial of one of the world's most famous sportsmen always promised to attract a lot of attention. The international media were camped outside the courthouse and Andrew Harding was part of the scrum.
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There were two men sprawled across my car bonnet, trading ineffectual punches. We were one block from Pretoria's High Court and the self appointed street guards who offered a watch over people's cars here in exchange for a few coins were in a particularly competitive mood. I left them to work it out, locked the door and walked past the satellite trucks, the tents, the man with a video camera slung below, a miniature helicopter, the temporary burger bar, the crowds of commuters, and on into the courthouse entrance, the same one Oscar Pistorius has been using each day of his long trial. After the queues and chaos of last year's bail hearing, things have settled into a more leisurely routine. I waved at Sandra, who sits behind the X ray machine, and shook hands with Marappa, the tall guard always in position outside Courtroom D, checking our badges. Inside, the double doors and soundproofing give the room its own muffled atmosphere. It's like stepping onto a stage. There's prosecutor Hedy Nell, an edgy bird like figure, chatting to the state forensic experts. And to the left, a smiling Barry Roo, his forehead touching his client's as he and Pistorius lock in a two man huddle. Then the families arrive. It's been a strange experience sitting so close to the Pistorius clan all these weeks. Some days we chat. Uncle Arnold, the family spokesman, has a relentless optimism that rarely seems put on. We talk about holidays, children and sometimes the case itself. Oscar's level headed sister Amy turns round to join the discussions that ripple along the journalist's bench just behind the family. But some days, inevitably, there's been no chit chat and it's easy to imagine how we must seem to them. Vultures perched on their shoulders, tweeting about every tear. Further to the right, Riva Steenkamp's mother, June has sat impassively each day, any emotions bottled up tightly and out of sight. She's always surrounded by several members of the ANC Women's League. Some sniff that their presence is cynical political opportunism, but it's clear that June has enjoyed their support. And then there's A shh from the guard and we all rise as Judge Tokazili Masipa enters stage left and makes her way to the podium at the front of the court. These final days have shown the judge in a new light. For weeks, she's been a discreet, largely silent presence. She reminds me of my Scottish grandmother. But in delivering her verdict on Oscar Pistorius, Judge Masipa has been a revelation. Brisk, confident and. And brutal in her assessment of the prosecution's largely circumstantial case. I've been struck by two things in particular. The first is how succinctly she stripped away the conjecture and the flab that had attached itself to the trial. Reasonable doubt is what matters, and she's reminded all of us that it's up to the prosecution to prove its case, not Pistorius. The second is how human she's been in her reasoning. Some judges can seem almost robotic in their meticulous interpretations of the law, but Judge Masipa really seems to listen to accept people's errors, sometimes even their lies, as part of life, to embrace human complexity, not reject it. Which brings me to her verdict. Ever since I raced up to Oscar Pistorius Estate on February 14 last year, I've been struck by how polarized and absolute people are about what they think they know happened. Some email me insisting no woman would ever take a cell phone into a toilet at night. Others say it's inconceivable that a man wouldn't check where his partner was before rushing to confront an intruder in the next room. Pistorius must be either a ruthless killer or a vulnerable, tragic wretch. But the evidence suggests a middle path, and Judge Masiepa has followed it. Was she right to rule out murder that day? This debate will go on for years. We'll see what happens at sentencing. But if he does spend some time in prison, she may have got the balance about right. It's tempting to draw out big themes from events like this about crime and race in South Africa. Violence against women, disability. Fair enough. But this case has not been easy to pigeonhole. It wasn't a trial about a rich man buying his freedom. The state's experts proved to be at least as competent as the defenses. And this wasn't a watershed moment in race relations. The sight of a black woman judging a white man may still startle some and inspire others. But these days, most South Africans seem to take such things in their stride. This was, above all, a celebrity murder trial. The fall of a very special local hero, the prospect of forgiveness and redemption still a long way off.
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Andrew Harding we heard this week that Malaysian Airlines MH17 was brought down over Ukraine after being punctured with high energy objects. The Dutch crash investigators who released their preliminary report didn't actually say the flight was brought down by a missile, but they did say there were no emergencies on board, no technical faults, and the pilots did not make a mistake. Many people point the finger of blame at the rebels in eastern Ukraine, possibly supported by Russian forces. For those who witnessed the scene of the crash back in July, it's been difficult to forget what they saw. Darius Bazargan is one of them, barrelling
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down a highway in eastern Ukraine, heading to the crash site. We're covering the big story and truthfully, I'm excited to be there. Buzzing. The feeling doesn't last. Our vehicle slows only for roadblocks, manned by bored looking paramilitaries wearing the standard mixture of sportswear, camouflage and fake Ray Bans we waved through without a second glance. They become used to the letters TV taped onto car windscreens for it's become ever clearer to me that there was and remains a partition in time, a chronological borderline for all those touched by this. Life before MH17 and life afterwards. At the wheel is Alex, a cabbie from Donetsk who on the surface at least, has been doing quite nicely for himself of late, earning top dollar, translating and transporting various media around. But he seems off key now. He can't quite focus on where he is, what he is doing. Alex is returning to the crash site for maybe the fifth time. How is it? I ask him. It's. Alex trails off. It's like he tries again. Minutes pass, we slow to negotiate yet another checkpoint, and I think he's forgotten my question. Like a hell, Darius, he suddenly blurts out. I jump back to reality. So come and see our hell in sunflowers. The contrast between the bucolic calm of the softly rolling landscape, the golden yellow flora and the charred metallic ruins of the aircraft only adds to the surreal awfulness. Flight MH17 suffered a massive explosive decompression when shrapnel, likely from a so called Buk anti aircraft missile, ripped into its airframe at 30,000ft, sending debris and passengers plummeting into a field of sunflowers near an otherwise unremarkable village called Grabowa. The poor souls on board died in an instant, mercifully, but their bodies came tumbling through the air at several hundred miles an hour. At those speeds, clothing's ripped off, ligaments and tendons snap, limbs are Smashed and contorted. Those first on the scene met an impossibly grisly sight. Corpses lay semi clad or naked, splayed in grotesque and unnatural contortions like an image of the Afterworld by Hieronymus Bosch. And the smell Burned jet fuel mingled with that old journalistic cliche, the unmistakable stench of death. These corpses lay exposed for days. There's no dignity in any of it. Three days in the summer sun and the dead putrefy quickly. Then there was the banality of the passengers belongings. Football books, touristic souvenirs, those colorful little suitcases children can sit on in airport queues. Hello Kitty backpacks, lego sticker books. 80 of the victims were children. And I feel morally contaminated just looking at all this. Even breathing the air feels wrong. The foul odor clings to your clothes, your hair, your skin. I see haggard, exhausted looking first responders gathering the remaining corpses and body parts and bagging them up. They load these sorry packages onto a dump truck turned hearse. These men have been here for days. They barely speak to one another anymore. Nothing can have prepared them for this. Their lives have been wholly altered before MH17 and afterwards. Alex, the driver, stands off to one side, talking to a local man whose house lies completely untouched. Lucky doesn't come close. Had the Aircraft travelled another 20 yards, his home and everyone inside would have been obliterated. The man is also a paramilitary. He has a Kalashnikov in his hand and he stares mournfully at the hulking remains of the Boeing. If you'd come here before, he says, I would have said to go down that road. There's the most beautiful fishing lake down there. We'd go swimming with the kids. There's a large wooden cross next to his house and Alex, who's a devout Christian, mumbles something about Jesus having spared the hamlet. But he's less clear as to why the divine powers sanctioned the slaughter of 298 innocents here before MH17 and after MH17. Weeks later, back in London, I awake one morning with a sudden, overwhelming sorrow. I cannot face the day. I don't want to go to work or play with my children or eat or be. It wasn't trauma. It felt more like utter heartbreak. I think of all this often. The 298 people who died in a split second, those who couldn't protect their children, those left grieving. I think too of the rescue workers and villagers who'd had to collect smouldering wreckage and decomposing bodies, and of Alexand, of all those others. Whose lives were mournfully interrupted after MH17 smashed into a field of sunflowers one fine summer's day.
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Darius Bazargan There are just five days left in the countdown to the Scottish referendum. There's plenty of speculation, but no one knows what's going to happen should the yes camp win it, though, there'll undoubtedly be consequences right across Europe, not least in Spain. The regional government of Catalunya says it will have its own referendum on independence in November. Scotsman Niall o' Gallagher joined the crowd celebrating Catalonia's national day.
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Barcelona's Cathy Zurich is a perfect place to watch the world go by. Perched at the top of Las Ramblas, the famous boulevard that links the city to the sea, in you can enjoy the strong black coffee, breathe deeply of acrid cigar smoke, and watch the street acrobats turn daring somersaults on the hard paving stones. On a day like this, almost unbearably hot for this northern visitor, the sun shines brilliantly through the fountains on Plaza de Catalunya, the falling water catching its rays and refracting them into a thousand points of light. But on this day, the city itself seems to bubble over without warning. People and their thousands well up from Barcelona's underground railway system in an effervescent flood of yellow and red, for this is the national day of Catalonia, the territory of around 7 million people located for the moment in Spain's northeastern corner. 300 years since the fall of Barcelona, in the war that saw Catalans lose their historic autonomy, its people have come together to demand a vote on their future. Young and old, in colors that recall circus harlequins or their ubiquitous pa am tomaket. That's tomato pulp scraped over preferably stale bread. The people spill out onto the streets of the Catalan capital. At the table next to me, Laudes and Jordi preside over an anarchic brood who giggle uproariously as they rattle spoons in the adults empty coffee cups. The little ones seem to outnumber their elders four to one. It's like a festa, laudes tells me. They've come south for the day from Girona, near the border with France. I've been listening to her argue with a friend, another favourite Cathy Zurich pastime, about the referendum on Scotland's independence in a few days time. That's happening because of an agreement between the governments in London and Edinburgh, but the Spanish government has ruled out such an accord here. After remarking on the intense heat, I let it slip that I've come from Scotland to report on the protest, though the word seems inaccurate. Tourists look on incredulously from their open top buses as Barcelona is brought to a cheerful standstill. It's all smiles. Children wear T shirts insisting on their right to be educated in Catalan, that consonantal exception among the Latin languages whose verbs crack like clapping hands. More adult slogans include use your language. Make love in Catalan. This is a day to be together. It's for the families. I want my children to be part of it, laudis tells me. We are a family, jordi adds, and we want to vote as a family. Laura agrees. She's enjoying tapas with her husband, Philip. We all laugh as a toddler waddles past, gripping a seira, the Catalan flag, in each of his chubby hands, waving them in an exuberant display of childish semaphore, clearly convinced that the whole day has been put on for him. We are peaceful, she tells me. We want peace. We're not as joyful as the Andalusians, but when we feel something, we feel it intensely. Andreou, a shrewd man who runs a local restaurant a few blocks away, concedes that the National Day celebrations are good for business. His head waiter, Juan, swaggers around the bar. He insists that he only speaks Catalan until presented with two young women visiting from America, he miraculously finds his tongue in English. His boss, pleased by the ringing of the cash register, is nonetheless skeptical about independence. I'm a Catalan. My parents and grandparents were Catalans. But independence, no. Andreo has filled my glass before. He's keen to know what's going on in Scotland, but insists that Catalonia is different. I think it would be better, he says, if we all stayed together. Others in Catalonia agree and want to remain part of the wider Spanish family. Today, those voices are in the minority. At exactly 14 minutes past 5, Catalans and their hundreds of thousands hold hands, filling two of Barcelona's main thoroughfares, creating a giant letter V for victory and above all, for vote. Protesters politely move to one side to let me take photographs, while another, concerned that I might get burnt, tells me I failed to rub in a spot of sun cream below my right eye. That, they tell me, is the Catalan way, a riot of colour in which no one gets hurt. Where it will lead remains, for now, unclear.
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Nial o' Gallagher with the flag waving Catalans Ivory coast used to be the economic powerhouse of West Africa, but after the longtime opposition leader Laurent Gbagbo was elected president in 2000, the country was plunged into more than a decade of Conflict from which it's slowly emerging. The nation was bitterly divided. On Sunday evenings, though, people from all sides gathered around their television sets to laugh. Lucy Ashe has been to Ivory Coast's main city to meet the woman behind a comedy show, the country's most famous actress.
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On a sticky grey afternoon, we're cruising through Coccodie, Abidjan's smartest neighbourhood. Eventually we stop outside a house on a quiet side street. Akisi Delta opens the door with a flourish, fanning herself and complaining about the heat. She's wearing a skimpy black vest, fat gold chains and dramatic plum coloured eyeshadow. I'm about to greet her, but remember that all the newspapers that morning warned Ivorians to avoid shaking hands because of the Ebola virus. So, feeling more than a little foolish, I do the government recommended elbow bump instead. This provokes peals of such high decibel laughter from Akisi that the lights on our tape recorder shoot into the red. Wiping her eyes, she invites us into her living room, which looks rather like the set in her celebrated TV series. There's a fancy glass table, low slung leather sofas and chairs swagged in loud fabrics. Akisi, who created and stars in the soap, did use her own place and homes of friends to film the first series back in the early noughties before it became a hit across francophone Africa. I never dreamt it would be so successful, says Akisi. To date, she's shot 260 episodes and is about to launch a new season and an English language version. Not bad for an unschooled village girl from the center of the country. Ma Famille, or My Family revolves around an incorrigible womaniser and his long suffering w. Played by Akisi with episode titles such as Dirty Linen, the Trap, Betrayal and Confessions, the series is an extended riff on infidelity and the battle of the sexes. Set in a middle class home in Abidjan, the cast of characters includes scheming second wives, vengeful mothers in law, gossipy neighbours and mischievous household staff. Much of the action is devoted to the ruses Akisi's second husband, a small businessman, invents to spend the night night away from home, or as they say, decouches. For example, Akisi says he'll ask me to make him fried plantain chips for supper, but then behind my back, he tells our cook to prepare soup instead. There'll be lots of confusion and he'll use the row as an excuse to go and visit his mistress. Yet Akisi's character puts up with it all partly out of pragmatism, but also because her Don Juan is silver tongued. He's juggling all these women and somehow he finds exactly the right words to say to each of them, she says. African men never used to watch tv, she adds, except for the news and sport. But with ma famille, they're glued to the screen. Even African presidents are hooked, she claims. They all want to be like my husband, the main character. Viewers enjoy the sarcastic humour, but at the same time, the show tackles issues like aids, genital mutilation and polygamy. There's no point lecturing people, says Akisi. Nobody would listen. Now, to save lives, some women's health organisations are copying Akisi's strategy of putting the men centre stage. In the remote village of Sakasu, a group of men, all wearing identical orange T shirts, gather beneath a mango tree. It's part of a pioneering scheme called the School for Husbands. Two years ago, the government and the United Nations Population Fund launched these schools in four villages in the region where Akisi was born. The main aim is to increase the numbers of women going for antenatal checkups and hospital births. After a decade of conflict, Ivory coast, once the envy of West Africa, now has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. The doctor in charge of the local health district tells me that women want to go to the hospital, but men control the purse strings. Now they've created a solidarity fund to cover the taxi cost to the hospital. The schools are also teaching the men about gender equality and helping out around the home. But when I ask one of the model husbands, David, if he ever does the laundry, there are howls of laughter. His wife Aya, busy shelling a basket of peas, says she's expecting her third child and would like to stop at 4. We use family planning, says David proudly. And he adds that condoms are best because they protect his wife from disease if he has intercourse with other ladies. I'm a bit surprised by this piece of information from a man I've only just met. But he doesn't look remotely embarrassed. Aya continues, placidly shelling her peas. But I wonder what she feels inside when I tell Akisu this story. She just shrugs. In the end, they all give in to temptation. Well, some don't, she says, displaying her rings and elegant manicure. But you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
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Lucy Ash, who gets her husband to shell the peas. And that's it for this edition. I'll be back next Saturday with more Shenanigans from our own correspondence.